Remember DeLorean, the 80s one-hit automotive wonder whose DMC-12 steel sports car with gullwing doors appeared in Back to the Future? It's making a comeback – by getting into high-speed aerial racing.
The company is participating in the first-ever racing championship for electric flying cars. It's called the Airspeeder International Series, and DeLorean announced it will be the constructor of the US team.
To be clear, DeLorean is not building the electric flying car that will compete in these races. Like every other competitor, the US Airspeeder team will use a standard Mk3C aircraft, albeit with DeLorean's branding and custom livery for the series that kicks off next month.
It'll get its hands dirty later on, as it partners with universities including UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech to engineer future race aircraft for the 2027-28 season.
So what's this race about? Australian entrepreneur Matt Pearson's been building this for the last decade, with a view to advance electric flight tech by creating a competition that requires innovation, which could trickle down to flying vehicles that will be used for commuting, transporting cargo, and emergency response. It's similar to how F1 technologies have slowly been adopted into passenger cars.
Airspeeder has gone through some trial races, and the 2026-27 season that starts in November will be the first proper series, with teams for Australia, New Zealand, and Italy on the roster. It isn't yet clear if the aircraft will be piloted by a human in the cockpit, or controlled remotely.
The races will see pilots fly these cars through 3D courses with virtual gates in the air; you can see what that's like in the clip below (starting around the 0:56 mark). Teams will use the Mk3C, which is likely an evolution of the Mk3 that we first saw in 2021 from Pearson's company, Alauda Aeronautics.
Designed and built in Adelaide, South Australia, the 13.5-ft (4.1-m)-long Mk3 featured a 96-kW electric powertrain and weighed just 220 lb (100 kg) uncrewed. Its high thrust-to-weight ratio is said to allow it to fly at speeds in excess of 75 mph (120 km/h). An array of onboard sensors help avoid collisions in the air.
The aircraft also got a 'slide and lock' system that allowed for quickly swapping out batteries during pitstops on the ground.
Back in 2022, Airspeeder conducted the first-ever eVTOL race using remotely controlled vehicles on the salt flats of Lake Lochiel near Adelaide. From the latest promo pictures, it looks like DeLorean might compete at the same location.
That's quite the pivot for this ill-fated automaker. The company went bankrupt in 1982, before it could sell a whole lot of DMC-12s – which are now regarded as cult classics. The brand was acquired by an English mechanic named Stephen Wynne in 1997.
A decade ago, there were plans to produce a modernized DMC-12, but that hasn't happened yet. We also saw a performance EV prototype in 2022, and you can reserve one on the company's site – but it's said to still be in development.
That means we might get a flying DeLorean before a new one hits the road. Airspeeder sounds like it'll be a hoot to watch; stay tuned for updates on the upcoming race series.
Source: Airspeeder
